KP Front

Open source · Switzerland

Digital incident command for the fire brigade.

KP Front is the digital command post at the scene: situation, plans, SCBA, log and report in one app.

Open the demo No login – in the demo, Musterdorf is on fire right now (interface in German)
Situation view: tactical map with Swiss FKS symbols, sectors and hose lines

For whom

  • Militia fire brigades
  • Local fire brigades
  • Regional support fire brigades
  • Professional fire brigades
  • Industrial fire brigades

For what

  • Fires
  • Road traffic collisions
  • Technical rescue
  • Hazmat and oil spills
  • Major incidents

Grown out of the real operational work of Feuerwehr Oberwil BL – proven there, and developed further with every incident.

Your data stays with you.

KP Front is open source and runs on a machine in your own station or in your own cloud. Incident data, plans, crews and reports stay under your control.

  • No licence fees
  • No vendor lock-in
  • Run it yourself and adapt it to your needs

The measure

«Usable at 3am – after six months without practice»

In a militia fire brigade nobody sits at the screen every day. So the app has to be built for someone half asleep to get right: everything that matters visible at once, sensible defaults instead of settings, and every action can be undone.

From the call to the report

One incident, one app.

This is what a night with KP Front looks like – the situation, SCBA and documentation stay consistent and traceable for everyone involved.

03:01

Call

The call comes in.

Take over an alert from your paging system (e. g. Divera or FireHub) with one tap – or start by hand from an address, a building or the map. The location and the building data are there before the first appliance rolls.

03:07

Situation

The first situation picture is up.

FKS tactical symbols, sectors, hose lines and notes on the digital situation map. Hydrants, utility lines and vehicle positions sit underneath as layers.

03:12

SCBA

Team 1 goes in.

Cylinder pressure, turnaround time and contact clock run per team. The app speaks up before it gets tight – even when nobody happens to be watching the clock.

03:18

Plan

The building plan becomes a whiteboard.

Open the pre-incident plan, draw on it, place teams, measure to scale – with the same tools as on the map.

03:40

Log

Everything is in the log.

Type it, or simply speak it – when a transcription service is configured, voice memos can be turned into text; otherwise they stay as audio in the log. The log is only ever added to, never rewritten – corrections use new entries, not an eraser.

04:30

Shift plan

Relief is planned, not guessed.

If it turns into a long night, the shift plan holds, per person, from when to when they are available and when they are rostered. The coverage line shows where there are too few people – before the gap is there. Attendance is untouched by it: planning happens here, ticking off happens there.

05:55

Report

By the time you head back, the report is nearly done.

Situation, crew, resources and log flow straight into the incident report. Nobody has to reconstruct the night from memory afterwards.

Afterwards

Replay

The night runs once more.

For the debrief, the replay plays the whole incident back: situation, teams and log exactly as they stood at any given minute. It skips the long waits – four hours become a few minutes.

From the demo

This is what it looks like.

Every image is taken from the public demo. Click «Open the demo» and you are standing in the same incident.

The screenshots are in German: the public demo is, and they come from it – staged images would be a claim rather than evidence.

Plan
Building and pre-incident plans with tactical symbols, markings and measuring to scale
SCBA
Monitoring of teams, times, pressures and check-ins
Building
The floors stacked up – which team is working on which storey
Log
Running documentation of everything that matters – voice memos can become text with a configured transcription service
Attendance
Who has turned out and since when – the basis for the crew list and the report
Shift plan
Plan shifts on long incidents – available, rostered, actually there, and where coverage breaks down
Checklists
Your own command checklists, with direct jumps to plan, log and tools
Resources
Record equipment and consumption during the incident instead of estimating afterwards
Report
Nearly done when you head back – check it, add to it, export as PDF, send it straight to the printer

Switching over

What changes.

None of this is broken today – the paper situation map has worked for decades. KP Front steps into the same places, only without the copying out.

TodayWith KP Front
Situation map on paperSituation picture on every device
SCBA board and stopwatchMonitoring that speaks up by itself
Scraps of paper and memoryA log that keeps up
Building plan in a folderA plan you can draw on
Report the day afterReport as you head back
Debrief from memoryRun the night through again

Scope

What is in it.

Grown at real incidents and exercises, not from a feature list. Everything that comes from outside – paging, GPS, printers – is optional: KP Front runs perfectly well without any of those connections.

Situation & plan

  • Tactical symbols to FKS conventions, with attributes and labelling
  • Sectors, cordons, areas and freehand drawing
  • Hose lines with FKS annotations, each assigned to a team
  • Measuring distance and area, to scale on the plan as well
  • Layers: hydrants, utility cadastre, cantonal map services
  • Hazardous materials reference: UN numbers, substance information and guidance on isolation and protective distances, available directly during the incident
  • Weather and wind information to support the situation assessment
  • Building plans as a whiteboard, stack of floors, blank board
  • Undo/redo on every surface – documented events remain traceable
  • Georeferencing: link a plan to the map through shared landmarks – symbols appear as twins on both surfaces, with an honest read-out of the accuracy

Crew & resources

  • SCBA monitoring: pressure, turnaround time, contact clock, alarms
  • Teams with or without breathing apparatus: crew, assignment and team leader – on the map, on the plan and in the stack of floors, each with its own team colour, the same everywhere
  • Attendance with arrival times and ranks
  • Shift plan: plan availability and shifts per person, see coverage across the incident and print command forms
  • Share location: whoever opens the link appears as a dot on the situation map – voluntary, and only for this incident
  • Share the incident by link; access is clearly indicated and can be revoked at any time
  • Resources and equipment with stock and consumption
  • Checklists for command support and incident command
  • Incident commander view: read along without moving anything

Documentation

  • A log that is only added to and never rewritten
  • Voice memos with transcription, photos, reminders
  • Replay: play the incident back minute by minute, waits skipped – for the debrief
  • Ready-made incident report as a PDF, including crew, resources, times, log, sketch, photos and SCBA monitoring
  • Photos as attachments to the report
  • Completion check: before closing, KP Front shows which information or clarifications are still missing from the report
  • Partner organisations with their remarks in the report
  • A capture sheet by QR code for everyone who has something to contribute
  • Alert and incident times from what actually happened, not from memory

Running it

  • Offline-capable as an installable app – the readiness check shows before an incident whether the required data is on the device
  • Several connected devices work on the same state – after a connection interruption, changes are synchronised again
  • Roles: edit, or read along only
  • Day/night mode, symbol size, large touch targets for the tablet
  • Can take over alerts from Divera or FireHub; further alerting systems can be connected through the open interface optional
  • Vehicle positions by GPS optional
  • PDF printing at the station optional
  • Your own administration area per fire brigade: crew, vehicles, checklists, map layers and templates
  • Interface in German, English, French or Italian – set per fire brigade

Related project

KP Front commands at the front. KP Rück keeps the overview behind it.

KP Rück is the digital version of the magnetic board in the rear command post: one board for personnel, vehicles and equipment. Its own app, the same handwriting – the two can hand incidents over to each other, but neither needs the other.

Take a look at KP Rück

Running both – without setting everything up twice

Dispatch
The same payload for both. Your dispatch integration is built once; each app only gets its own address.
Divera access
One key for both – the same alarms, the same roster. optional
Print agent
One service in the station serves both apps and both kinds of printer.
Roster
The same source in the same file format – the same person on both sides.
Keywords
The same alarm keyword list, so the same classification in both apps.

Database, updates and login stay separate. Neither one needs the other to run. Guide: both on one server →

Questions & answers

The questions we get most.

Why switch?

Everyone sees the same situation at the same time – in the command vehicle, on the tablet and with the incident commander. No message is lost on a scrap of paper. The SCBA monitoring speaks up by itself before it gets tight. Less radio traffic for questions that are already answered on the situation picture – and the report is nearly done as you head back, instead of the weekend after. KP Front helps the incident commander keep the situation free of contradictions and make the odd one out visible: a team out of radio contact, an appliance that is nowhere, a check-in that never came.

Who owns the data?

You do. Maps, plans and incident data live on your own installation. Map and address services receive only the location being requested; other external services run only when you configure them. Nothing is sent automatically to a vendor or the maintainer.

What does it cost?

The software itself costs nothing. KP Front is open source (AGPL) – no licence, no subscription, no per-device fee. What remains are your own costs for operation, infrastructure and any external support you may need.

What does it take to run?

A small mini-PC or server at the station is enough. Setup, updates and backups require someone with Docker and command-line experience, whether in the brigade, the municipality or an IT support provider. The guide and administration area lead through the setup. We are happy to answer general questions; data and operation remain the responsibility of each fire brigade.

Can we adapt it to how we work?

Yes. Every fire brigade has its own administration area: crew, vehicles, doctrine and templates are all set there. Checklists, building plans and map layers come from your own station data and are loaded with the command-line tools that ship with it. And because the whole code is on GitHub , anything else can be built – by you or to your order.

What languages does the app run in?

The interface comes in German, English, French and Italian. The language is set once per fire brigade, not per device – during an incident everybody reads the same terms, and that is deliberate: one situation, one vocabulary. The public demo runs in German. The screenshots here are from that same instance – staged images would be a claim.

How do we start?

With the demo, no sign-up – Musterdorf is already on fire. Then try it at an exercise. If it fits, the setup guide leads to your own installation.

Contact

Tell us what you think.

Do you want to try KP Front at your fire brigade? Is something missing, or does something not work the way you expect? Get in touch – we read everything.

For questions and open-ended ideas there are the GitHub discussions.

Report a fault What happened, and what did you expect? Drag screenshots straight into the form. Ask for something Is a step missing that is part of how you work? Describe the case, not the solution.
Write to us directly Without a GitHub account, or when something should not be public – including «we would like to try this at ours».